


A Possible History for the MCU Obadiah Stane

by Megpie71



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate History, Gen, Metafiction, Potential History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 12:17:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4564383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megpie71/pseuds/Megpie71
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta-fiction, trying to make sense of Obadiah Stane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Possible History for the MCU Obadiah Stane

He's recruited to Stark Industries in the mid-1960s, a bright young student of management and business studies, who is then put into the role of Personal Assistant to Howard Stark. He's ambitious, intelligent, and adaptable, and he quickly learns the workings of the weapons and technology company. Howard and Maria Stark have a tempestuous marriage, with numerous temporary separations. While Maria has fallen pregnant a number of times, very few of those pregnancies have lasted. There was reportedly a stillborn child not long before Obie was recruited, but that's something which is kept very hush-hush. Those rumours which make it out whisper of deformities, caused by Howard's work on the Manhattan Project no doubt. So when Howard starts to groom Obadiah to take on the leadership of Stark Industries, nobody objects - or at least, not where Howard or Obie can hear it.

However, in late October of 1969, Maria Stark announces she's twelve weeks pregnant. It appears the celebrations of the moon landing extended to the Stark bedroom, and this time it stuck. Howard Stark is going to have an heir to Stark Industries.

To Obadiah Stane, this is the potential ruin of so many plans. Already he has sunk almost five years of his life into Stark Industries, and he can see it as an ideal showcase for his abilities, as well as a wonderful cash cow to be milked once he takes his deserved place as head of the company. The weapons development side is something Howard excels at, and there are plans stored in Howard's private files enough to keep the company going for at least a decade before there's any requirement to find another designer. The technology side isn't quite as well-staffed with innovators, but then, it's just blue-sky stuff, and it can be dropped. There's nothing to worry about just yet. 

Maria's blood pressure is high enough to be causing her doctors concern - at least one is urging her to terminate the pregnancy. The child could be stillborn again. It could be deformed, or retarded - Maria's in her forties, and Howard is fast approaching the shady side of fifty, mongolism is a definite probability. Heck, there's a fifty percent chance Howard's precious little heir could be a girl, and wouldn't that knock him sideways. 

Six months pass, and in April of 1970, Maria Stark gives birth to a healthy, hearty baby boy. 

But there's still a chance for Obie. After all, there's no guarantee little Anthony Edward Stark is going to grow up to be a genius like his daddy.

Obie carries on being a good PA to Howard. He encourages Howard to spend more and more time with his wife and infant son - and watches in well-hidden satisfaction as Howard's own neuroses drive him away from them. He's charming and gracious toward Maria, urging her to rejoin her social circles after the pregnancy, finding a good nanny, making endowments to infant schools on behalf of Stark Industries. He holds Anthony when he's asked to, bounces the baby on his knee, and chucks him under the chin, encouraging Anthony to come to Uncle Obie if he ever needs help. No harm in starting good habits early, after all.

The day Tony brings Howard a picture of a toy engine he wants to build, Howard is overjoyed. Obie, hearing about it the next day at the office, and looking over the rather clumsily-drawn design (but then, the kid is only three) sees an end to the likelihood of his succession. He's foolish enough to say so in front of Howard, but Howard just laughs. "We'll see," he says, and carries on bragging about how clever his kid is to everyone in range.

Obadiah Stane considers leaving Stark Industries. 

By now, Obie Stane is pretty solidly enmeshed in the cogwheels of the corporate world. He knows about the ultra-black agency SHIELD, and Stark's involvement in it - even met Director Carter once (pushy broad, in Obie's opinion). He's never actually been permitted to know anything about Howard's business for them, however, beyond the fact they exist, and Howard blocks out at least two days a week dealing with them (this is on top of Howards "other projects" time every summer, when he heads north on an icebreaker to try and find the legendary body of Captain America). So he's surprised when he's approached independently by someone he knows to be a SHIELD agent, with the prospect of being introduced to some people who might be able to help him with his long-term career aspirations.

Learning of the hidden existence of HYDRA within the haven of SHIELD just brings an ironic little grin to Obie's face. He meets with a Doctor Arnim Zola, an old German honcho from back in the forties. Brilliant technologist, better even than Stark, but unfortunately not permitted to develop his inventions to their fullest potential. The quid pro quo is simple: Zola is dying, and wants to be able to preserve his mind. He's figured out a way of using computers to do this, but SHIELD isn't willing to fund the amount of dedicated hardware which would be required. Can Stark Industries, through Obie, help him out? In exchange, Herr Doktor Zola will advise Mr Stane on how best to tread in order to achieve his ambitions with regards to controlling Stark.

A deal is struck, and Stark Industries starts to fund a carefully selected sub-group of their engineering section, labelled the Insight team. Insight's budget and skills are assigned to an off-the-record project - a little fit-out of a disused room under a decrepit bunker in a decommissioned army base which used to be the SHIELD command centre. Zola smiles approvingly at Stane's choice for his last resting place - one in the eye for the long-deceased Captain America (Obie doesn't see what was so great about the guy, really, but it seems like everyone who's involved with SHIELD has some kind of hard-on for him - either they want to fuck him like Howard and Carter do, or break him like Zola does, or both). 

(Obie will be asked some day, by someone he's going to have killed, why he made a bargain with Nazis. He doesn't tell them the reason is because he's never seen what was so wrong about the basic philosophy of Nazism itself - of course there are greater and lesser people, winners and losers; it's a fact of life. His main comment about Hitler and the Nazis was always that they got too carried away with the racial purification stuff. If they'd avoided the purges, avoided stirring up all the Jews and half-Jews - people like Howard Stark, whose great-grandfather came to America wearing the name Baruch Stokowski - they'd have managed to build their Reich of a thousand years without interference). 

Obie starts telling Howard how great Tony is. A real genius of a kid, bright as a button, a real engineering genius, and so young to be just like his Dad! Just like Zola said, every single word of praise to the kid goes straight to the heart of Howard's insecurities. Howard's drinking more, he learns from his sources in the Stark mansion staff. Drinking more, and getting nasty with it. The first time he sees little Tony with a bruise on his face ("I fell down the stairs," Tony tells him, looking away as he says it) one fine morning in early June, he does a shocked and horrified performance to Tony, saying he'll take Howard away for a while. (The kid's face falls. Tony doesn't know Howard was going to be heading North on that fucking icebreaker a couple of weeks from now anyway, so Obie just talks Howard into putting the trip forward - more searching time, Obie will take care of things at Stark Industries, you go look for your old friend, right?). 

Obie bides his time. The years pass, and the breach between Howard Stark and his gifted son grows with every single one of them. The more Tony (advised by his good old Uncle Obie) tries to impress his father with bigger and better projects (his first engine at age four, his first circuit board at age six, his first functioning robot by age eight), the more Howard distances himself. Howard's drinking is starting to become noticeable to people outside his home now, and he's handing more and more of the business side of Stark Industries over to Obie. Obie starts building the right kinds of connections within the miliary and intelligence community. Initially introduced by Howard Stark, but more and more finding Zola's little secret handshake gets him further up the tree, Obie increases the size of Stark Industries weapons manufacture and weapons research section. Some of Zola's untried designs are passed to the Insight team in Stark, and they prove surprisingly saleable to sources both within and without the US Government. 

Obie lets Howard host that ridiculous expo (a monument to a drinker's ego, he thinks) but whines subtly the whole time about the cost, and the amount of resources it chews up, and the budgets and the rest of it. It doesn't happen again - Howard's reaching the point where he has a limited number of things he's willing to devote time to. One of them is always that search for Captain America, and Obie's got into the habit of sending him away earlier and earlier each year now (Don't worry Howard, I'll look after things back home. You go find your friend) because it gives him a longer and longer period where he has uninterrupted access to the whole of Stark Industries. 

It almost backfires the year Tony turns twelve (the kid's already doing high school subjects at the fancy boarding school he's been sent off to) when the icebreaker hits a bad storm and has to ditch flotsam. One of the things they ditch is Howard Stark's liquor cabinet, and the bastard comes back from the trip dried out and firing on all cylinders. He almost discovers the Insight team and the little bits and pieces they're working on, and that could have been disastrous. As it was, there was a huge argument between the two of them in the main hall of Stark manor (Obie spotted Tony watching from the upstairs hallway) in which Obie offers his resignation then and there. Howard's angry as hell, but not angry enough to accept. He calls Obie every name under the sun, while Obie re-iterates he's just doing his best for Howard and Maria and Tony - doing his best to keep Stark going during trying economic times, and it's hard to do that when the CEO of the company is off in the middle of the North Atlantic for months on end every year! 

The stress of the argument gets Howard drinking again. Obie's told by his latest spy in the mansion staff that Tony came down and had a big argument with his dad not long after Obie had apparently stormed out in rage. The two of them nearly came to blows, and it seems Howard wasn't the only Stark to try and find refuge from their problems in alcohol. Tony has apparently stolen a bottle of his dad's best whiskey and keeps it hidden in his room. Maria stays out of things these days (she's been seeing a psychiatrist Obie recommended, and they're keeping her doped up to the eyeballs). 

Tony finishes high school in the year he turns fourteen, and is immediately packed off to MIT. Obie winds up being his main contact, because by now Howard is feeling very insecure and doesn't want the kid anywhere near him while he's working (and Tony, having spent most of his life as the odd duck in his classes, has an excellent grasp of the art of verbal warfare - so when he spots a weak spot in his dear old Dad's armour, he goes in knife, fork and rammer). Obie doesn't have to do anything to assist in the disintegration of their relationship - they're neither of them willing to talk to one another, and Tony is turning into as much of a lush as his old man, with the enthusiastic assistance of various MIT undergraduates. They pass three years not speaking to one another for more than the length of time required by occasional press appearances, or formal dinners.

Howard's making another stab at sobering up when Tony brings home his first B.Eng, and the two of them actually manage a civil discussion for the first time in five years about whether or not Tony's going to carry on and get his Masters. Howard's fascinated by Tony's work in AI and robotics - while Howard is pretty good with robotics, Tony's work in AI is unbelievably advanced, a quantum leap forward from anything anyone's ever seen (well, aside from Zola's computerised mind, still ticking away in that bunker in New Jersey - but neither of them know about that, and the only one likely to ever learn of it is Tony). Tony brings out some of his designs, and Howard suggests Stark Industries look at commercialising a couple of them - he's figured out a way to upgrade targeting algorithms for guided missiles, as well as a few minor applications which might just come in handy elsewhere. 

When Obie is handed the designs, he makes sure to praise them to the skies. Kid's overtaking his old man and so on. But this time, instead of getting defensive and aggressive, Howard just looks calmly proud. "Yeah, he is", he says. "He'll be a great CEO one day". Which makes Obie look twice, since it's the first time Howard (who's now into his seventies, and is starting to look it) has said anything serious about someone else taking over from him since before Tony was born. Howard starts putting a greater degree of attention into the business than he has in years. Obie's no fool. He can see the writing on the wall, can see Howard is busy trying to get things in order so Tony can take over.

Phone calls are made to people who know the right sort of people. History is ... altered. But really, Howard Stark was over seventy, and he'd had a couple of drinks that night. While the man was a phenomenal mechanical engineer, all that skill with a wrench wasn't going to save him when he had a blow-out in the middle of a highway in the face of an oncoming truck.

Tony disintegrates, and finds solace either in the bottom of a bottle or an engineering blackout. Obie picks up the reins of Stark Industries, and keeps the young heir out of the public eye for a while, until he can figure out which way Tony is likely to jump. Fortunately for Obie, there's some friends of Tony's around to... help him out. People like Tiberius Stone (who's the son of Stone Media; old Ollie Stone is a friend who ... knows the right people, so to speak) who drags Tony off to Europe in a whirlwind of drinking, dancing, debauchery and drugs. Tony's billionaire playboy reputation starts to spread into the tabloids (not the Stone tabloids, of course... but given that upstart Aussie Murdoch also knows the correct handshakes and is willing to help a friend, it's no big deal if the Sun and the Star feed the proletariat annoyance of their readers on the antics of the heir to Stark Industries). Obie doesn't interfere until the point where the engineering blackouts and their resulting designs and prototypes stop flowing in, at which point he pulls Tony back home to the USA.

Tony completes his Masters and his PhD in one frenetic year at MIT (renewing his friendship with James Rhodes in the process). Rhodey tries to pull Tony out of the bottle, but only partially succeeds - he slows Tony down, but never quite stops his drinking. By now, Tony's dropped a lot of the drugs because they interfere with his engineering (it's hard to use a blowtorch when your hands are shaking, after all). 

Then Tony turns twenty-one, and Howard's controlling stake in Stark Industries becomes his by right. The first decision the kid makes is to move over to California. He takes the engineering, IT and research divisions with him, as well as a good half of the administrative staff. Among those administrative staff is a young woman in the accounts department by the name of Virginia Potts, who has yet to come to anyone's attention aside from that of her immediate supervisor. His attention is mostly on the chest of the girl in the cubicle next to hers, but he tries his luck with her as well. 

The resultant sexual harassment complaint to upper management is how she comes to the attention of Tony Stark.

Tony hires her as his PA. 

Obie expects her to last at most a month, like all the other pretty girls (and the occasional pretty boy) Tony has hired to fill the role. Obie doesn't mind their rapid turnover - the lack of a steady PA on Tony's part makes it so much easier for him to keep up the funding for Insight, and also makes it easier for him to start feeding weapons contracts under the table to some new friends he's made. As that old Roman said, money has no smell, and laundered drug money, whether from cocaine or opium, spends as well as the rest. His "old friends" are occasionally solicitous of donations these days, looking to help more of the right people into the right places, or train up the right sort of kids to do the right sort of jobs in SHIELD.

Instead of washing out within a month, or quitting in a rage due to Tony trying a pass at her, Virginia "Pepper" Potts remains as Tony Stark's PA. She's quiet, deferential, organised, and fortunately for both herself and Obie, she has both hands very thoroughly full trying to keep Tony on task, sober enough to perform, and out of the tabloids for longer than three days at a stretch. Tony alternates between bouts of debauchery and bouts of engineering genius; Pepper tries to keep him on task; and Obie carries on calmly hiding his little side projects. They carry on like that for at least ten years, through two tempestuous engagements, another four PhDs, and any number of semi-serious girlfriends on Tony's part, three attempted resignations on Pepper's, and one near-miss on Obie's (he'd been foolish enough to leave the Insight files out in the open one day when Tony stopped into his office; fortunately Tony had bought his story it was a long-deleted project pulled out from the archives). Stark Industries subsists mainly on Department of Defence money these days; when Tony gets whiny about ethics and such, Obie reminds him about how the defence contracts pay for the technology experiments, how Howard was always involved in weapons development, and how keeping America strong was good for everyone.

But by the time Tony is in his late thirties, the engineering blackouts are becoming fewer and further between. The new designs aren't coming, and the whines about ethics and accountability are starting to become more regular, in between alcoholic binges. Tony doesn't want to work on weapons any more - they're dull. He's much more interested in AI, robotics, and programming again. He tries out all kinds of improvements on his house management system (the Janitorial and Administrative Regulation Virtual Integrated System, or JARVIS, for short), and gets it to the point where it sounds like one of those robots you see on the television, although he insists (just like the rest of the damn geeks Obie hires) that genuine AI is many years away. 

Tony turns in the design for the Jericho, and tells Obie that's the last missile design they're getting from him - he's much more interested in telecommunications right now. Obie puts plans in place, calls friends, and friends of friends of contacts. There's still all those designs of Zola's, after all. It'll be a tragedy should Tony accidentally die on this sales trip he's set up, and it'll be a pity those terrorists got him. But Stark Industries will live on with Obidiah Stane at the helm, and go from strength to strength. Who knows? Maybe with the right people on the board, he'll be able to get his name over the door, too.

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes:
> 
> * This has it's origins in a line in lalaietha's "your blue-eyed boys" series, where someone points out one of the reasons Tony Stark is being particularly difficult on a particular day is because he's finally sat down and started sorting through a lot of the SHIELD/HYDRA data dump and discovered Obadiah Stane's secret handshake may well have been "Hail Hydra".  
> * It also comes out of my own deconstruction of some basic principles for HYDRA (as per the information we have about them in the movies) and fitting them together, and noting they're not that different to the general aims of most organisations dedicated to the preservation of the rights of the upper classes. Which isn't surprising, because neither the goals of the Nazis nor the goals of the Italian Fascists were actually that different to the goals of the upper classes within their respective societies either - about the only real difference of opinion they had was over who should be the person at the top. (Further ammunition: the British Legion of Fascists was largely an aristocratic/upper-class organisation).  
> * The idea that Obadiah Stane was a corporate sociopath is something which is, if not outright stated in the films, certainly supported by the available evidence in Iron Man 1.  
> * I got interested in things like time-lines and possible ascension paths - I kept the ages as close as I possibly could to the ages of the actors (Jeff Bridges was born in 1949, Robert Downey Jnr was born in 1965) within the boundaries of believability for the characters. I have Tony Stark being born in April 1970 because really the youngest age I can realistically believe Tony Stark would be in the films is about my own - I was born in 1971.  
> * The bit about the Apollo 11 moon landings as the reason behind Tony's conception was just a very happy coincidence! Once I did the counting on my fingers and discovered the months panned out, it seemed like too good a reason not to grab at. I still have Tony's birthday happening in early April (according to my head-canon - Tony Stark is an Aries and believe me, I know from Aries!), which means Tony arrived about two weeks early - probably for the first and only time in his life.  
> * Coming up with believable backronyms which don't sound incredibly clunky for "J A R V I S" is bloody difficult.


End file.
